Sawcer is the app-baby of a group of friends who love cooking, eating and sharing recipes. Parts Australian, Spanish, Swedish and Japanese, we have all made Barcelona our home. And we found ourselves with the same problem – where to find the ingredients to make the dishes that feed our hearts and minds (and stomachs)?

The local grocers and supermarkets have mediterranean products but we also want to know where to get ingredients like Asian greens and oyster sauce to make stir-fries, halloumi and tempeh for barbecues, spices for curries and things like gluten-free bread and organic flours. Google doesn’t help – it finds restaurants, recipes and online shops, but no list of local shops or specialist stores in the neighbourhood.

Our solution started with lots of actual legwork – hours spent walking round Barcelona and saving shops to a google map when we found hard-to-come-by products. We shared our knowledge between friends and created a Facebook group calledIngredient Hunters Barcelona. The group is super friendly and helpful and has grown quickly but the limits of Facebook means that it functions mainly as a list of questions and answers, often repeated, and then lost after a day or two.

So we got together over some Thai green curry and Moritz and decided to tackle this issue. Using our skills in programming, graphic design, digital communications and project management, we came up with a plan to turn the group into an app, which we called Sawcer.

Sawcer lets you search for ingredients via a map to find your closest local supplier, and you can also share your favourite finds with others. A simple solution that takes the stress out of sourcing your shopping!

For shops it means having an online presence without having to become an online shop. For cooks it helps to find ingredients close to home, where we can see something before we buy it and talk to someone if we have any questions.

We see Sawcer becoming a community of people sharing a passion for food and helping each other find tricky ingredients, at the same time supporting the local shops in our barrios.